Serapio Vargas Ramírez, a state deputy in Sinaloa, appeared in a Facebook video on Saturday to promote his idea for a nudist beach near Culiacán. Screenshot
A Sinaloa lawmaker has proposed creating the world’s largest nudist beach in Navolato, a municipality with a coastline on the Gulf of California.
Serapio Vargas Ramírez, a state deputy for the Morena party, said late last week that the plan was to allow nudism on a 2.1-kilometer stretch of beach on the peninsula of Altata Bay. Altata is a popular beach getaway spot for residents of the state capital of Culiacán, but is less well-known among international tourists.
“We’re going to make a 2.1-kilometer nudist area, 100 meters longer than Zipolite,” Vargas said, referring to the nudist beach on the coast of Oaxaca.
Vargas told the Sinaloa Congress that the aim was to attract tourists from Europe and the United States.
The beach will be a “magnet for people from Sinaloa, Mexico, Europe and North America,” the lawmaker said in a video that circulated on social media last weekend.
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Speaking on the proposed stretch of coastline after emerging from the water, Vargas said the beach would be called Playa de los Bichis, or Bichis Beach. Bichi means nude in Sinaloa slang.
“We are owners here of an area of more than four kilometers … right over there is the Bay [of Altata],” the Vargas said. “We’re going to make an avenue right here, at least 1000 meters long.”
The semi-clad lawmaker said he and his associates planned to create exclusive sections of the nudist beach for the gay community and people aged over 60.
“It’s not discrimination. The LGBT+ folks or those older than 60 could mix in the free areas or they could coexist in a special area for them,” he said.
Vargas said that municipal laws would have to be changed to allow creation of the nudist beach.
“We’re going to ask the Navolato council to allow nudism; nudism is to be able to walk without clothes, … nudity makes us all equal,” he said.
The deputy also proposed the construction of a one-kilometer-long beachfront avenue and the sale of coastal parcels of land. He rejected any suggestion that his proposal wasn’t serious.
“We already have the sea, we already have the beach, we already have the area to develop, we already have the bay and we have the expectation that a project like this will catapult Altata [to tourism success],” Vargas said.
If the proposed nudist beach were to be created it would be Mexico’s fifth after Zipolite, Bahía de Matanchén in Nayarit, Maruata in Michoacán and Playa del Secreto in Guerrero.
Asked about the proposal, Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, who also represents Morena, said he didn’t have an opinion but hoped Vargas’ idea was a joke.
The Hilton Tulum Riviera Maya Resort is one of the company's new locations that is scheduled to open this year. Hilton
The U.S. hotel chain Hilton plans to open 15 new hotels in Mexico this year, taking its total offering in the country over 100.
Mexico is Hilton’s fifth most important country and the chain has long term plans to expand its offering to 200 hotels. The initial investment will create some 25,000 direct and indirect jobs, the company said.
The new developments will be in Zacatecas city; Guadalajara, Jalisco; Monterrey, Nuevo León; Mexico City; Tijuana, Baja California; and Saltillo and Torreón in Coahuila.
There will also be new hotels built in the tourist centers of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato; Tulum, Quintana Roo; Nuevo Vallarta, Nayarit; and La Paz, Baja California Sur.
The vice president of development for Latin America and the Caribbean, Juan Corvinos, said Mexico is a region Hilton is focused on.
“Our prospects for Mexico are very good … We have aggressive growth plans. We will have these 15 hotels before the end of the year, we have many openings scheduled,” he said.
Corvinos added that the investment would provide an economic boost in the areas around the new sites.
“Peripheral businesses are generated through [the hotels]. Not only do we need employees in the hotels, but there is a whole productive chain that has to provide the fruit, wine and vegetables. All those products generate wealth in the locale,” he said.
Corvinos confirmed that investment would not stop at the 100 mark.
“There is a lot available for Mexico. The production chain is analyzing new places, we have to continue developing throughout the Mexican republic. The goal is more than 200 hotels,” he said.
As for the tourism industry, Corvinos said he expects it to be fully recovered from the effects of the pandemic between 2023 and 2024, although he thinks some destinations could recover earlier.
Founded by Sheyla Vera Hilton and Conrad Hilton more than 100 years ago, Hilton has 575 hotels in more than 130 countries.
The first flight to depart from the Felipe Ángeles Airport is baptized on Monday on morning.
Less than 2 1/2 years after construction began, the 80-billion-peso (US $3.9 billion) Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) commenced operations on Monday with the first flight departing in the early morning for Villahermosa, Tabasco.
An Aeroméxico plane carrying 89 passengers took off from the México state airport just before 7:00 a.m., about 20 minutes later than scheduled. It touched down in the Tabasco capital at about 8:00 a.m.
The AIFA, built by the army on an Air Force base about 50 kilometers north of downtown Mexico City, also received its first incoming passenger flight on Monday morning – a VivaAerobús service from Guadalajara, Jalisco.
A total of 20 departures and arrivals are scheduled for Monday, said National Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval.
That figure includes 14 incoming and outgoing domestic flights, and the arrival and departure of a plane operated by state-owned Venezuelan airline Conviasa, which has announced weekly flights to and from Caracas. The other four scheduled operations are the arrival of two private jets from the United States and the arrival of cargo aircraft from Saltillo, Coahuila, and Laredo, Texas, Cresencio said.
Just over 2,000 passengers are expected to use the new airport on its first day of operations. It was built to relieve pressure on the Mexico City International Airport (AICM), which has reached saturation point, according to the federal government. On average, more than 136,000 passengers travel through that airport daily.
At President López Obrador’s regular news conference, held at the airport Monday morning, AIFA general director Isidoro Pastor said commercial flights to the United States will commence in the second half of 2022. He suggested that Delta and Panamanian airline Copa will be among the carriers offering services to the U.S.
López Obrador said that millions of Mexicans are in favor of the construction of large scale public infrastructure projects such as the AIFA, which the president chose to pursue after canceling the previous government’s larger, more expensive airport project, which he claimed was riddled with corruption.
AMLO also said that the AIFA is 100% complete. “It’s completely finished. Planes can touch down 24 hours, take off and arrive with modern radar systems,” he said.
He traveled to the new airport at 5:00 a.m. Monday from the National Palace in downtown Mexico City, taking 40 minutes to get to the facility. The newspaper Reforma reported that the convoy of which the president’s vehicle was part didn’t experience any delays.
Given its distance from Central Mexico City, travel times to the new airport have been a hot button issue. Pastor said last week that fast check-ins would compensate for longer travel times.
The AIFA posted a video to its TikTok account Sunday that claimed that travel times to the new airport are shorter from various points of the capital when compared with travel times to the site of the canceled airport in Texcoco, México state. Getting to the AIFA from the center of Mexico City, the neighborhoods of Condesa, Polanco and Interlomas, and the Mundo E shopping center takes less than an hour, the video said, even without new highway infrastructure in place.
The newspaper El Universal reported that getting to the AIFA from the AICM took 1 hour and 49 minutes on Saturday, but Pastor presented information last week showing that the journey takes just 57 minutes.
López Obrador has said that getting to the new airport from central Mexico City by train will take just 45 minutes, but the rail link is not expected to be finished until 2023.
The Benito Juárez Hemicycle at downtown Mexico City's Alameda Park is a memorial built by his successor Porfirio Díaz in 1910. Creative Commons
Believe it or not, of all Mexico’s federal holidays, only one is dedicated to a prominent Mexican historical figure: that historical figure is former president Benito Juárez and his holiday is coming up this Monday on March 21.
This might seem odd to those of us whose countries have holidays dedicated to several of their historical personages.
Even odder is that Juárez is not connected to the War of Independence that made Mexico a self-ruling state nor to the Mexican Revolution, which shaped the country’s current political reality.
Benito Juárez was president between those two events, from 1858 to 1872 — well, that is, when he was not forced out of Mexico City by foreign and domestic armies.
To say that the 19th century was a turbulent time for Mexico is a great understatement. The War of Independence ended in 1821, but that was just the start of a long process of nation-building that would end 100 years later with the Revolution.
Portrait of Benito Juárez as president.
During that century, Mexico was free from Spanish rule but divided politically. Conservatives wanted some kind of government similar to that of the colonial period — be it a monarchy or a dictatorship — with a powerful Catholic Church. Liberals wanted a more Enlightenment-inspired secular society like the United States and some European countries had.
Constant civil war kept giving one faction or the other the upper hand, but it weakened the country: what is now Central America broke away from Mexico shortly after Independence. The U.S. took over a third of the country. Twice, the Yucatán peninsula tried to break away.
Benito Pablo Juárez García was born on March 21, 1806, in the poor community of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca. There was nothing in his early childhood to indicate his future destiny.
A full-blooded Zapotec, he was orphaned at a very young age. He lived with family, but conflicts caused him to run away to Oaxaca city at 13.
Here, he fell in with a monk who saw the young man’s intelligence and sponsored his education. Juárez was supposed to become a monk, but he decided to study law at the Institute of Sciences and Arts of Oaxaca instead.
His political career began in his home state, as did as his trials and tribulations: he opposed Antonio López de Santa Anna ceding the north of Mexico to the U.S. and was exiled to Cuba in 1853 for two years until Liberal Ignacio Comonfort gained the presidency.
Ignacio Comonfort, with whom Juárez wrote Mexico’s 1857 Constitution. Creative Commons
With Comonfort, Juárez helped create the 1857 Constitution and when it was adopted, he became the new nation’s first president. However, Conservative factions who found the constitution unacceptable immediately responded, triggering the Reform War (1858–1860) during the first two years of Juárez’s presidency.
Juárez initially fled to Panama, then returned to the port city of Veracruz to form a kind of government-in-exile. The United States soon recognized his government and with its help, he retook Mexico City and the country as a whole.
The Juárez government began implementing the principles of the 1857 Constitution on a national level, introducing agrarian reform, press and religious freedoms, rights for women and the political weakening of the Catholic Church.
Perhaps the most visible vestige of these efforts today is the great number of former monasteries in Mexico, as Juarez’s government seized church properties that were not churches. As a result, many of these buildings remain intact, still owned by the government.
However, the end of the Reform War did not mean the end of Juárez’s troubles: the country was in massive debt to England, Spain and France with no means (or desire) to pay. The French decided to take advantage, invading in 1861 with England and Spain under the pretext of collecting its debts. But after England and Spain came to agreements over the debt with Mexico and left, France named Austrian prince Maximillian I as emperor of Mexico in 1863 with the help of still-hopeful anti-Juárez Conservatives and others.
And so Juárez’s next four years were dedicated to a resistance movement that recaptured Mexico City yet again and executed Maximilian in 1867. Even afterward, rebellions against Juárez’s presidency continued, the most serious of which came from Porfirio Díaz, a former ally in his Liberal Party.
Juárez’s mausoleum in the San Fernando cemetery in Mexico City. PetrohsW/Creative Commons
Juárez managed to hold Díaz off until his death of heart failure in the National Palace on July 18, 1872. Afterward, political instability rose again until Díaz took control of the country in 1884.
In death as in life, Juárez’s fortunes have been tied to those of the 1857 Constitution: considered extremely radical by many at the time, it would become the first major step to a modern Mexico, with both it and Juárez eventually gaining mythical status. Even Díaz had to refer to the 1857 document Juárez helped create for his own legitimacy, but he simultaneously circumvented it to become a dictator for three decades.
The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was a reaction to Díaz’s dictatorship rather than backing the constitution’s principles, but ultimately, the 1917 Constitution that the victorious rebels used to replace it was the old one with a long social agenda tacked on.
In her book, The Cult of Juárez: The Rhetorical Construction of the Hero 1872–1976 (El culto a Juárez: La construcción retórica del héroe), historian Rebeca Villalobos touches on how Juárez became a larger-than-life figure for modern Mexico. His dedication to liberal principles and the 1857 Constitution was a sharp departure from the dominant strongman or cult-of-the-leader politics that dominated previously (and, in the case of Díaz, after).
Villalobos does call Juárez’s memory a kind of “cult,” but a cult of the rule of law. This cult continues to evolve today. And so you have to dig a bit to find any criticisms of Juárez, either as a person or a politician, unlike most other Mexican historical figures and presidents.
He’s the closest thing that Mexico has to a secular saint.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 18 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
Of late, chapulines are part of a surge in interest of traditional Mexican cuisine, like this chapulín panucho.
The small bowl of chapulines, legs and bodies akimbo, arrived unannounced with an order of guacamole recently.
Although I know grasshoppers have been eaten in Mexico for centuries, still, so much ran through my mind, first and foremost being: do I really have to eat one?
My adventurous friend had no qualms about adding a couple to her guacamole-laden chip, declaring that they tasted like “crispy salty raisins with legs.” Alas, I couldn’t get past the gag reflex enough to chew their plump little bodies and verify that comparison. The best I could do was quickly swallow it whole, grimacing all the while.
That’s a common response to entomophagy (eating bugs) for many of us in cultures where insects are not part of our regular diet. But history tells us that not only grasshoppers but crickets, mealworms and other bugs have long been eaten in cultures around the world — and more than just the worm in the tequila bottle.
High in protein, low (or free) in cost, plentiful, local and, to some, delicious, insects are eaten in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and, yes, Mexico. In more modern times, chapulines were served as a “novelty snack” at the Seattle Mariners home games beginning in 2017.
In some parts of Mexico, grasshoppers and other insects have been a traditional food for centuries.
Chapulines are an integral part of Oaxacan cuisine, and if you’ve been there, that should come as no surprise. Fried and salted, mixed with garlic cloves and sometimes peanuts, they’re a popular snack. They’re added to tacos and tlayudas; blended into soups and guacamole; toasted on a comal; or seasoned with lime juice, chiles and salt and added to egg dishes. Blended or ground and mixed with salt, they’re turned into a pretty, reddish-brown seasoning to sprinkle on just about anything you want.
Chapulines are also popular in some parts of Mexico City. Of late, they’ve become part of a surge in interest of traditional Mexican cuisine and ingredients.
Can you eat just any grasshopper? Well, yes and no. It’s the small chapulín de la milpa that’s eaten in Oaxaca, and like many other ingredients used for cooking, young ones do indeed taste better. Harvest season starts with their hatching in May and goes through late summer. This variety is small and bright green.
While you can catch your own in other parts of the world, naturalists caution against eating any unknown bug, especially if they have bright yellow, orange or red markings, which can indicate toxicity. You’d also want to avoid areas where pesticides have been used. You can order them from Amazon.com. If you’re in Mexico, they’re available in small packages like any other spice or sometimes in bulk.
Those of you with queasy tummies may want to stop reading now. There are some tricks of the trade when it comes to preparing grasshoppers for cooking.
Even though they add so much to the presentation, you may want to remove the legs and wings; while not harmful to eat, they can be, umm, distracting. WikiHow.com has an entire page devoted to grasshoppers as food and suggests boiling them (like lobsters — alive) for a few minutes or freezing them for 10–15 minutes “to make the legs easier to pop off” and kill them.
In case you were wondering, eating raw grasshoppers is not recommended.
“Some people also pull the head straight off, which removes the guts, including the stomach. This tends to remove certain kinds of parasites,” WikiHow continues. “You can then insert a stick into the cavity and cook it over a fire. Great brushed with teriyaki sauce while roasting!”
My guess is that not many of you will venture out into a field and catch your own. Yes, one grasshopper contains a whopping six grams of protein, but still.
Should you want to experiment with your bug-cooking or insect-eating proclivities at home, try any of these recipes below — and let me know how it goes.
Garlic Butter Fried Grasshoppers
¼ cup butter
6 cloves garlic
1 cup grasshoppers
This Creamed Grasshopper Soup is perhaps a good first step for the curious but uncertain foodie.
Melt butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Sauté garlic 4-5 minutes until golden brown; add grasshopper. Turn heat to medium-high and sauté more, stirring, about 10 minutes.
Drain on paper towels.
Grasshopper Fritters
¾ cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt plus more for serving
¾ cup milk
1 egg, beaten
1 cup dried grasshoppers
Vegetable or coconut oil for frying
Sift flour, baking powder and 1 tsp. salt. Add milk; whisk until smooth. Add egg.
One at a time, dip grasshoppers in batter, making sure they’re completely covered.
Heat about 1 inch of oil in frying pan. Cook coated grasshoppers until golden brown and crunchy, turning to cook all sides. Drain on paper towels, sprinkle with salt and serve warm.
Cream of Grasshopper Soup
½ large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 plum tomatoes, chopped
1 cup grasshoppers (fried)
1 potato, cubed
1 liter chicken or vegetable broth
½ cup cream
2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 cups tortilla strips
4 springs fresh parsley, minced
Salt and pepper to taste
In a saucepan, heat oil over medium heat; add onion and sauté 3–4 minutes. Add grasshoppers and garlic; cook and stir one minute. Add tomato, stir and simmer for 10 minutes. Add broth; turn heat to medium-high. When boiling, add potatoes.
Reduce heat to medium and cook 8–10 minutes till potatoes soften.
Working in batches, pour or spoon soup into blender and pulse carefully until thoroughly smooth and blended. Pour back into pan and over low heat, slowly stir in the cream. Season to taste with salt and pepper. To serve, garnish each bowl with parsley and tortillas chips.
Every little bit counts, but it’s going to take more than refusing straws to save marine ecosystems.
A few years ago, a friend and I took our kids to a cafe.
When the waiter brought them straws for their drinks, my friend’s son turned to the waiter and said, “No, thank you, I love the animals in the oceans.”
It wasn’t my proudest moment, sitting there struggling not to roll my eyes at a four-year-old.
The idea that he’d been made to think refusing a straw meant that he was rescuing an untold number of animals struck me as preposterous and unhelpful.
What he was doing was just one more way (on a list that’s a million items long) that we heavily stroke our egos and teach our children to do the same. We tell ourselves that saying no to something once in a while is doing enough to save the planet.
When it comes to the environment, we have such a habit of overestimating the effects of our efforts and drastically underestimating the effects of the harm we cause.
I am just over it.
To be clear, I’m not saying that every little bit doesn’t count. If we all stop using straws, that’s a lot less plastic. But it’s going to take a lot more than refusing straws to save the entirety of marine life.
Straws by themselves are easy to give up, and there are replacements now on the market for those who really want them: bamboo ones, reusable metal ones. It’s easy to be environmentally conscious when adjusting one’s behavior doesn’t represent a huge modification of one’s habits.
But, as food vendors in the capital can tell you after the single-use plastics ban in Mexico City, people don’t just stop expecting what they’ve always expected overnight. And just because we decide to suddenly not allow something doesn’t mean that the need for those items will go away. This was well-illustrated by the the rude awakening many women had upon suddenly not being able to buy tampons in the capital — to help the environment.
In this moment, I looked over at the boy’s mother, who was beaming with pride at her son’s environmental conscientiousness.
Well, maybe he’ll eventually make the connection with all the other plastics we use, I thought.
Refusing certain specific plastics isn’t nothing; it’s merely something that must go hand in hand with a solution for all the plastics and trash we’ve got lying around already.
Because let’s face it: most of us don’t think that much about our trash once it’s carted away; I certainly don’t. Where does our trash end up? Who knows? And who cares?
Thankfully, some people do know and care.
There are a great number of ways of dealing with trash collection and recycling in Mexico. The only constant is that it’s not uniform: each municipality is individually responsible for its own trash collection procedure and policy.
Another somewhat depressing constant is that most trash sorters and recyclers work on their own to receive income from what they collect and are not municipal employees that receive salaries or benefits; they often live right inside the landfills.
So, while some places like Mexico City have quite well-developed trash infrastructure and procedures, there’s no national trash policy, meaning that each community is left to essentially figure it out for themselves, reacting to rather than planning for trash as they grow.
This week, Mexico News Daily reported on the “plastics problem” in Puerto Escondido, a popular growing hub for both tourists and permanent expats. One of the tell-tale signs that the place is popular is the amount of waste that it produces, which has grown in tandem with its population.
Humans are messy. Wherever we go, we leave behind debris, and that is just a reality. We might clean our own particular areas, but the things we throw away don’t simply disappear; they go somewhere.
As the short film in the plastics problem article showed, that “somewhere” is, in some case, into the bellies of fish. It also goes on the side of a particular mountain there. And, of course, much of it goes into the ocean.
We need to take a two-pronged approach to this problem and work on reducing its use in the first place. The solution doesn’t just lie at the consumer’s feet.
Plastic starts somewhere as well, and I’m just so tired of this cycle of allowing them to be produced and put on the market for widespread use, chiding individuals for using them, taking them away when they don’t stop voluntarily, and then not having a reasonable replacement for things that have been woven into our economic infrastructure for decades.
Thankfully, there are people all across the country taking action. Along with those mentioned in Puerto Escondido, people have found many creative ways to recycle. There are the people who’ve learned to turn cigarette butts into productive fungus, and there are “green libraries” made out of recycled bottles.
There was also the plastics fishing tournament — something I think should be a weekly event; in fact, all of these efforts would be a thousand times more effective if they were widespread, institutionalized practices.
Like the dishes, managing trash is never done; there’s always more of it to deal with, and way too much of it will outlive us all, some by millions of years.
Maybe my little friend who refuses straws is onto something after all.
President López Obrador at his Monday press conference.
Three musketeers were spotted in Chiapas last weekend. President López Obrador was joined in the country’s southernmost state by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard. The trio’s visit to the Peñitas dam was no doubt colored by talk of AMLO’s proposed energy reform, which has stirred discontent in Washington.
Monday
The president, delighted by Argentina’s agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to delay its debt payments, referred to a letter he’d received from Argentine president Alberto Fernández.
“‘We’ve had the pleasure of receiving in Argentina Beatriz, your life partner. She seduced everyone with her freshness, her wonderful character and her enviable intelligence … I know you’re no fan of leaving Mexico, but you should make an exception just to brighten up the life of someone who loves you, respects you, and admires you. That’s me,” Fernández wrote.
The letter continued: “[Former German Chancellor] Angela Merkel once asked me what my opinion was about you. [I told her] it’s the first time in many decades that Mexico has a decent man as its president.”
AMLO said he’d consider a trip to Argentina and that a meeting with Joe Biden in Los Angeles in June was near certain.
The president had sent a letter to the European Parliament, calling its members sheep, in response to a resolution criticizing his confrontational stance toward the media. He assured that Foreign Minister Ebrard – a careful communicator – was fully on board with the response.
Members of the European Parliament are “very irresponsible and very intrusive. They have a colonial mentality,” the president reiterated.
Tuesday
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell might soon be getting less airtime: he confirmed that active COVID-19 cases have been trending down for seven consecutive weeks.
The president has often said that he hopes not to sound like a broken record. On Tuesday he closely resembled one, demanding that journalist Carlos Loret de Mola disclose his wealth and salary.
The president had previously shared what he said was journalist Carlos Loret de Mola’s 2021 income at a press conference in February.
“I have less wealth than those journalists. If I compare what I have with the most humble people, I am powerful, but if I compare what I have with some journalists, then I’m poor, because it is incredible what they have,” AMLO disclosed.
However, he did mention one journalist that deserved his admiration. Ryszard Kapuściński, a Polish journalist, reported on 27 revolutions and coups between 1956 and 1981 in Africa, South America and Asia.
The tabasqueño also praised the work of political commentators on social media, who’d created memes of the president’s letter to the European Parliament.
“I saw on Facebook, there are some really ingenious memes that made me laugh. Some really good ones came out after the response to the European deputies,” he said.
Wednesday
Lie detector Ana Elizabeth García Vilchis was well versed for the weekly section on media misinformation. She said it was nonsense that the Felipe Ángeles Airport was 54% over budget, the government hadn’t overpaid for land near the Maya Train, the Education Ministry hadn’t paid through the roof for face masks and there was no legal investigation into the Interior Minister.
García also found time to endorse a report by the news site Contralínea, which claimed that Carlos Loret de Mola and his family own 13 apartments in Mexico City worth 100 million pesos (US $4.85 million).
The president announced the arrival of another planeload of Mexicans from Ukraine, and a video was shown of them stepping onto home soil from an air force jet.
Later in the conference, he assured that the death of another journalist, Armando Linares in Michoacán, was nothing to do with public officials and insisted that such acts of violence were used cynically by European Parliamentarians against the government.
Icela’s deputy, Ricardo Mejía Berdeja, listed some of the security forces’ standout arrests: El Contador (the accountant), El Zorro (the fox), El Chaparrito (shorty) and El Huevo (the egg).
On Thursday, it was time for Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez’s monthly security report.
Mejía also named some of the suspects —and their aliases — for the murder of 17 people at a wake in Michoacán. It sounded more like a fairy tale lineup than mass murder: the old man, the chile and the toad.
On the humanitarian crisis of missing people, Deputy Interior Minister Alejandro Encinas admitted the huge backlog of unidentified bodies. He blamed states for a lack of volition to identify remains, and said it was high time the National Center for Human Identification was created.
However, the president was onto multinational issues later in the conference.
“Never has the United Nations carried out an important, transcendental action for the benefit of the world’s poor,” he said, before advising U.S. President Joe Biden to put a price cap on gasoline to keep prices low.
Friday
The conference took place in Minatitlán, Veracruz, where the president would commemorate the 84th anniversary of the nationalization of the oil industry.
The governor, Cuitláhuac García, said the state’s government had broken links with organized crime present during previous administrations and added that the National Electoral Institute (INE) was wrong to try to censure the president through the electoral silence, in the build-up to the vote on whether AMLO should finish his term.
The president celebrated a decree which allows public servants to promote the upcoming vote, and argued that the INE was failing to spread the word.
“What was the INE doing? Staying silent … the INE is acting undemocratically, it is conspiring against democracy,” he said.
The president then promised that he would respect the result, even if turnout didn’t reach 40%, the minimum to make the vote legally binding.
An ex-president had criticized the government’s handling of the pandemic.
“What inefficiency in the management of the pandemic?” AMLO responded, before adding that Mexico was 25th in global death rates. That puts Mexico just outside of the world’s worst 10% for deaths from COVID-19.
The president said he was off to sample some of the culinary delights of Veracruz before rounding off another week of mañaneras.
The president made his anti-corruption statements at a ceremony to mark the 84th anniversary of the nationalization of the Mexican oil industry.
President López Obrador sent a blunt message to the heads of Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) on Friday: immediately end any corruption that still plagues the state-owned firms.
Speaking in Minatitlán, Veracruz, at a ceremony to mark the 84th anniversary of the nationalization of the Mexican oil industry, López Obrador instructed Pemex CEO Octavio Romero and CFE director Manuel Bartlett not to give his adversaries any pretext to criticize the government.
“Let’s never allow more corruption in Pemex. Let’s clean it up completely, let’s finish cleaning up the corruption at Pemex,” he said.
“The same at the Federal Electricity Commission. Let’s not give any pretext to the conservatives. …. These companies of the people have to be examples of honest administration of the people’s assets, the nation’s assets,” López Obrador said.
Former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya is accused of involvement in a corruption scandal related to the granting of lucrative contracts to Brazilian construction company Odebrecht during the 2012-18 government led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto.
Former Pemex workers union chief Carlos Romero Deschamps has faced myriad accusations of corruption, including fraud, embezzlement, illicit enrichment, influence peddling and money laundering.
Another member of López Obrador’s family, his first cousin Felipa Guadalupe Obrador Olán, was embroiled in a scandal in 2020 because a company she owns was awarded four Pemex contracts worth 365 million pesos. The state oil company rescinded the contracts in December 2020.
The integrity of Manuel Bartlett, who has been involved in Mexican politics for over 50 years, has been questioned due to his wealth, including his extensive property portfolio, and alleged failure to fully disclose his assets. However, he was cleared of the accusation that he didn’t properly declare his assets.
A company owned by Bartlett’s son was fined and barred from receiving public contracts for a year and nine months in 2020 after it presented false information in a contract it signed with the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).
López Obrador’s desire to eliminate corruption from Pemex and the CFE is part of his endeavor to “rescue” the firms from what he describes as years of neglect and mismanagement and his broader anti-corruption agenda.
Despite his oft-stated commitment to eliminate the scourge, a new regional anti-corruption assessment that surveyed members of the legal community in Mexico found that there is “insufficient political will” for the implementation of the country’s anti-corruption framework.
The assessment, completed by the New York City Bar Association’s Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, also stated that the fight against corruption is being used for political purposes.
Leopoldo López Gil, a Spanish representative of the conservative European People's Party in the European Parliament and a co-author of the resolution that angered President López Obrador.
Mexico will have problems with Europe if it doesn’t take human rights issues seriously, according to a member of the European Parliament (EP).
Leopoldo López Gil, a Spanish representative of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), made the remark in the wake of President López Obrador’s pointed criticism of the EP after it condemned the harassment and killing of journalists and human rights defenders in Mexico in a resolution approved on March 10.
In an interview with the newspaper El Universal, López Gil, one of the authors of the resolution, said that the Mexican president’s insults – which included calling European lawmakers sheep – wouldn’t have an impact on the ratification of the updated EU-Mexico trade agreement, but added that EP members would nevertheless consider human rights abuses in Mexico when they vote to approve the pact.
Human rights issues in Mexico “will be present” in the minds of lawmakers and if the Mexican government doesn’t take them seriously “there will be problems,” he said.
López Obrador claims that his administration doesn’t tolerate abuses that were permitted under previous governments, but Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, among others, have denounced human rights violations since he took office, including unlawful killings, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances and violence against women and girls.
President López Obrador questioned Europe’s right to “interfere” in Mexico at his Thursday press conference.
López Gil, who is originally from Venezuela, attributed the president’s attack on European lawmakers – who he accused of “corruption, lies and hypocrisy” in a statement issued by his office – to personal motivation and the heat of the moment.
He noted that at least 47 journalists have been murdered since AMLO took office in December 2018, and claimed that the president has increased their vulnerability to violence through his repeated attacks on the media.
The EP said in its resolution that it was concerned about “the systematic and tough critiques used by the highest authorities of the Mexican government against journalists and their work” and called on authorities to “refrain from issuing any communication which could stigmatize human rights defenders, journalists and media workers, exacerbate the atmosphere against them or distort their lines of investigation.”
López Gil said the EP’s message is “simple and clear – we’re asking López Obrador to take the decision to defend and protect journalists and [human rights] defenders [and] end the aggressive and incendiary discourse.”
He said that the EP is still waiting for a formal reply to its resolution, affirming that “an insult, for me, is not a response.”
AMLO accused the parliament of being “meddlesome” when it has never acted in such a way, the EPP lawmaker added. López Gil said the EP has simply reminded the Mexican government that it is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.
The EP’s only objective is for peace to prevail in the “great country” of Mexico, he said, before comparing Lopez Obrador to Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro.
“There is a [common] denominator, … populism [and] a way of acting that tramples on the principles of democracy. Of course I’m worried, but the Mexican people should be more concerned,” López Gil said, adding that the EP will remain committed to standing up for Mexican journalists and human rights defenders.
Meanwhile, López Obrador took aim at the EPP representative and other “far-right” European politicians at his Thursday press conference.
“Our adversaries … even reach the European Parliament. … Who initiated this pronouncement against us, against the Mexican government? The far-right, especially from Spain,” he said.
“… A man from Venezuela, from the opposition in Venezuela, goes to Spain, … and the People’s Party, which is a conservative party, protects him, gives him shelter, and turns him into a member of the European Parliament. And the man was one of the promoters of [the EP resolution]. … This man, Leopoldo López,” the president said.
“… If Mexico is an independent, free and sovereign country, why are they interfering? Who gives them the right?” he asked.
Plastic-covered tunnels stretch into the distance, housing countless berry bushes in the Jalisco countryside. Berrymex
Berries are in. Everyone likes them because they are rich in antioxidants and because people in the know are interested in healthy food.
Mexico has certainly cashed in on this berry-loving revolution. More than 75% of fresh blackberries consumed in the United States are grown in Mexico, according to the North American Raspberry and Blackberry Association. The Berry Rush is in full swing in the states of Michoacán, Jalisco, Baja California, Guanajuato, México state and Puebla.
Farmers are ready to try something new instead of corn and potatoes. Berry-producing companies have figured out how to consistently produce great harvests here — and they guarantee Mexican farmers that they will buy their produce. What could be better?
According to the newspaper El Informador, berry cultivation in Jalisco has tripled in the last five years and now outstrips exports of the state’s emblematic beverage, tequila. Berry-growing companies arrive in farming communities with big promises of prosperity: money for landowners who lease out their property to the company and good-paying jobs for local workers.
Berries Paradise, for example, founded in 2008 in Tuxpan, Jalisco, describes itself as “an environmentally friendly operation,” that “allows people to prosper in Mexico without the need to migrate to survive.” Berrymex — founded in Jocotepec, Jalisco, in 1991 — says its focus is on “delighting consumers while generating prosperity for our workers in the field and in the communities where we operate.”
Berries are healthy and growing them in Mexico is profitable, but a price is being paid. Government of Mexico
At first glance, it would appear that the only negative aspect of berry growing is its need to be done in what growers call multi-bay tunnels, typically made of white plastic sheeting that’s visible for kilometers. Fields planted with corn, potatoes or cabbages are green and fit right in with the trees and bushes you expect to see in the countryside.
But plastic is anything but charming, which is why Pueblos Mágicos like Tapalpa, Jalisco, are up in arms about them, saying that the berry farms’ visuals affect their picturesque image. “State and federal authorities have abandoned our communities when it comes to controlling berry farming here,” said Antonio Morales, Tapalpa’s ex-mayor.
Other communities claim the berry industry has brought them nothing but calamities.
Quila el Grande, Jalisco, which sits at the northern end of La Sierra de Quila — an extraordinarily beautiful protected area famous for its pine and oak forests, huge rocks and waterfalls, lies 80 kilometers southwest of Guadalajara. It’s one of these towns with green hills that have turned white.
“A berry company called Vitatellus got a foot in the door here by buying a ranch,” said local businessman Sergio Camacho. “Then, once they were established, they began renting the surrounding land. They began with 40 or 50 hectares, but now they’ve got more than 100.”
“The main problem with Vitatellus, which seems to work hand-in-hand with Berries Paradise,” says Camacho, “is that they’re causing us to run out of water. They need so much that they are continually digging deeper wells in order to get it.”
One of many roads ruined by berry companies near Quila. Cindy Valenzisi
Not only that, but according to Camacho, although berry companies purport to bring prosperity to small communities, what they actually do is bring in cheap labor from faraway places.
“Let’s say, for every 100 people working for Vitatellus, four are from Quila and all the others are from Hidalgo, Chiapas, Toluca and who knows where else,” he said.
But even those imported workers aren’t profiting, Camacho said.
“They tell people in Chiapas that they are going to make big money, but once they’re here, they pay them una miseria (a pittance), and now what can they do?” he explained. “They’re not the least bit happy, but they’re stuck. These people are being abused.”
The problems also expand out to local farmers, who don’t usually have 1.7 million pesos handy to invest in berry farming and lease out their land to a large berry-growing company for about what they would get if they planted more traditional crops.
“What they don’t know,” says Francisco Quintero of the Selva Negra Foundation, “is that they will never be able to grow corn on their land in the future because the berry companies sterilize it with boron gas — which, because it is bio-accumulative, stays put in the soil permanently.”
That’s not snow in those Jalisco mountains, that’s a carpet of plastic from berry farms in Quila el Grande. Cindy Valenzisi
Berry farms also often lead to the degradation of local roads due to their use of heavy machinery, as well as the refusal of many of these companies to cooperate in road maintenance and repair.
“And then there is the sewage problem,” Camacho said. “The huge number of workers brought here from outside are overloading the sewage system. All the aguas negras (human waste) produced by this expanded population are running directly into the river, causing a disastrous pollution problem. And because they’re drying up our aquifers, there’s very little water in the river anymore, just sewage.”
Camacho’s uncle, Ignacio Luquín, agrees with his nephew’s claims.
“But,” he says, “I want to add something to his comments. The laborers [that] they are busing in from all over Mexico are being given food and shelter all right, but they have to pay for it. The food is bad, the dormitories are a disgrace and they’ve set up ‘company stores’ reminiscent of the tiendas de raya in vogue during the last days before the Mexican Revolution.”
The tiendas de raya played a strategic role in entrapping laborers in the days of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz. Miners, for example, could get anything they wanted on credit at the company store, including tempting items they really didn’t need. Soon they racked up huge debts they could never pay off, assuring the mining companies of a never-ending supply of cheap labor.
All the berry companies mentioned here were contacted for comment, but none responded.
One of 11 waterfalls in Sierra de Quila Park. Wells dug by berry companies are drying up the aquifers.
“This was such a beautiful place to live,” Quila resident Cindy Valenzisi wrote to the newspaper The Guadalajara Reporter, “but, unfortunately, it is being used and abused by a berry company that continues to expand. How can we stop, slow or change the impending doom looming over Quila?”
Berry Farm Driveby Quila Jalisco Mexico
A look at how Quila’s picturesque landscape has been transformed by berry farming.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, since 1985. His most recent book is Outdoors in Western Mexico, Volume Three. More of his writing can be found on his blog.
Berries are appearing everywhere in Mexico, even on street corners.
A bird’s-eye view of berry farms covering the landscape of rural San Isidro Mazatepec, Jalisco.
Despite promises of bringing local jobs, berry farms often bring in laborers from other states. They then end up trapped in jobs they can’t afford to leave. Lucía Vergara and Adolfo Valtierra
